REBUILDING BROKEN FAMILIES

Program Helps Adults, Kids Undo Damage

Every Friday night, 8-year-old Andrew has dinner with his sort-of stepdad,
Garry Jenkins, to talk about his feelings and how things are going in his
life.

Andrew and his two older brothers haven't had much practice with healthy
family discourse. Their father figure, Jenkins, has been in trouble, usually
because of drugs, most of his life.

But he has been clean the past two years. He's working on getting his life
back together - and being a better parent to these kids, his girlfriends',
whom he loves as if they were his own.

For eight weeks this fall, Jenkins and the three boys joined other families
whose parents are on court-ordered "intensive probation" in a family
communications program sponsored by the Maricopa County Adult Probation
Department.

The goal of the program, one of many new treatment tactics in the war on
drugs, is to help break the generational cycle of drug use and crime. While
babies in diapers attend, the Strengthening Families Program is geared to
children ages 5 to 12 whose parents are on probation.

"The whole family is affected by drug use, and mom or dad going away to
jail," said Cynthia James, who oversees the class.

As many as half the nation's criminal offenders are children of parents who
were imprisoned before them. Kids learn by example. Kids have access to
drugs in households where the adults are using drugs, and the grown-ups
often are so distracted by their own addictions that they don't know or care
what the kids are getting into, James said.

Children may even end up using drugs as a way to get close to parents.

The county's program is designed in part to break that cycle by encouraging
parents and children to share and care.

The program also includes drug education for the children. They are told how
drugs can make parents moody or seem not to care about them. Parents learn
to discipline their children in a positive way; kids are taught to take
responsibility.

At its core, the Strengthening Families Program is a drug prevention
program, James said.

"I see so many juveniles who are in adult programs who wouldn't be there if
they had learned some of these things when they were younger, if they had
known someone cared," she said.

Last year, 3,780 people went through court-ordered adult probation programs,
up from 1,400 in 1997, according to Zachary Dal Pra, an Adult Probation
Department supervisor.

"But when you consider that 22,500 are on probation in Maricopa County
alone," Dal Pra said, "we are missing a lot of people.

"An estimated 65 percent of those arrested - about 18,000 adults - have some
drug-related problem. That is 14,000 we are not serving, not to mention
their families."

At the end of the eight weeks, Jenkins and other parents in the class said
they already have noticed changes at home.

Before her sobriety began 17 months ago, Rhonda Gomez, 35, showed only
occasional interest in her three boys, ages 11, 12 and 16. She was too
"doped up," she said.

She remembers dropping by her mother's house, where her three boys live, on
Christmas Eve just long enough to deliver some toys before going back to the
streets.

"You can't undo the past," she told her kids one day during the family
program. "But I will do the best I can from now on."